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Thursday, July 17, 2014

Retro Dude Review: Pitfall

Hello everyone! Shall we play a game?

This time we're gonna take a closer look on a classic atari 2600 game better known as Pitfall or Pitfall Harry's Jungle Adventure.

The year was 1982 and the gaming industri was booming. An arcade on every corner and Starcade on the T.V. not a bad year to be a gamer at all. Atari was making the big bucks but failed to give credit where credit was due and because of that Activision was born. But thats enough brief history for now.

Pitfall made by brilliant designer David Crane who is also responsible for such titles as Dragster, Freeway, Laser Blast and many others, is an adventure game where you take the role as Harry. Your task is to find the 32 treasures of the jungle within 20 minutes while avoiding pits, lakes, crokodiles, snakes, huge scorpions, rolling logs everywhere and much more. The game ends when all the treasure is found, your time is up or when you have used up all your lives. The game itself contains 255 trees all of wich Harry will pass on his journey making the game a cirkular maze. That basicly means when you have finished the end screen the first screen reappears. Now while the graphics might not seem like much today back in that time it must have been impressive I'm sure. The sounds are typical Atari and it's the first game I have ever encountered with no music. There is only sound while you jump, die or run into logs and it makes the game at first glance seem rather boring (But I guess it beats the Astroids soundtrack) The gameplay on the other hand is very nice. Its smooth controlling all the way but its still hard as *!#@ Trust me on this one when you try jumping over a crokodile pit your accuracy and precision has to be perfect, and I do mean perfect if you're just a split second off you are dead. Then we got these almost trap like pits that just apears out of nowhere on the ground and they will lure you into sweet, sweet game over, right until you're ready to explode of pure agony! But once you get the hang of it the only real trick is to collect all the treasure before the timer runs out. So far after countless tries im still missing 2 (But hey im no expert)

Pitfall is all in all a very decent game compared to alot of other games that came out in that time period, the graphics and gameplay is nice and its almost addictive when you decide on getting all 32 treasures, and its one of the few atari games with an actual end goal, not just scoring points for all eternity. The commercial even had a very young Jack Black (that at the time might not have meant that much but today its pretty damn cool) So all in all if I had to rate it I would say its an 8/10 due to the missing soundtrack.

Thats all for my first review this is the Retro Dude saying goodbye and I do hope you get a chance on playing an instant classic!